The Big Story: 7 years on, Sept. 11 is so far and yet so close

It is not a tidy anniversary this year. Seven years between that awful day and this Sept. 11, the terrorist attacks linger somewhere between the immediate, a conscious part of our days, and the comfortable remove of the distant past. No longer yesterday and not yet history.

What happened seven years ago colors American life today. There are the two wars, of course. But in smaller ways, too: We sing “God Bless America” at the ballpark. We slip off our shoes at airport security, buy the zip-top bag for liquids and gels.

Seven years means we are far enough away that Sen. Joe Biden can joke in a Democratic debate that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani only mentions three things in a sentence, “a noun and a verb and 9/11,” and bring down the house.

Yet we are close enough that video of the towers’ collapse, the actual smoke, the crumbling, is so painful it almost never airs anymore, and when it is shown, as in a montage at the Republican National Convention, it is utterly halting.

No one will forget. But when is it OK to move on?

For the people who were left behind, left without a spouse or a child or a parent or a friend on that day, it is a very real question, something to turn over in their minds every day.

Cathy Faughnan’s husband, Christopher, a 37-year-old bond trader, was killed in the trade center. She was 37 then, too, and remembers thinking she was too young to be a widow for the rest of her life.

Now she is 44. Within two years after the attacks she moved back to her home state of Colorado, and has since been remarried, to a widower she met in New York shortly after Sept. 11.

She does not like to watch TV coverage of these anniversaries.

This year, for the first time, she took the three children she had with Christopher, Siena, Juliet and Liam, who are now 14 and 11 and 9, to ground zero, where steel from the rebuilding now pokes above street level.

At the visitors center across from the pit, they saw the pictures of thousands of people who died when the youngest of them was just 2 years old.

“I think that was the first time it really maybe hit them how many people died,” their mother says. “I saw them with their mouths open.”

Seven years means Kathy Agarth, who in 2001 lived in a Washington suburb and today teaches second grade at a private school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., must find a way to explain the attacks to children with no memory of it and little understanding. To these children, Sept. 11 is no different from Memorial Day.

She says her students know the term “9/11” and they pray for the soldiers and may write letters to them this year. She does not teach it as a separate lesson. But they do ask her about it from time to time, and she chooses her words carefully:

“Some men were angry at the United States. They crashed their planes into some buildings. Their actions were evil.”

Seven years means Somerset County, Pa., where United Flight 93 went down and where, in a way, the legend of “Let’s roll!” was born, is trying to figure out how to get the curious visitors who stream in from all over the country to stay awhile.

County commissioners are busy with feasibility studies, zoning papers, planning committees. A national park is coming. Hundreds of thousands of people will visit. They will need restaurants, hotels, gas stations, shops.

Sept. 11 as a segue to recreation: How far we have come.

Associated Press writers Matthew Barakat, Kelli Kennedy, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Solvej Schou and Amy Westfeldt contributed to this report.

McCain, Obama plan joint stop at Ground Zero

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)—Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama said Saturday they will put aside partisan politics for a joint appearance at Ground Zero to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, in a statement, said they will appear together at the World Trade Center site on Thursday “to honor the memory of each and every American who died” in the 2001 attacks.

The campaigns already had agreed to suspend television advertising critical of each other on Sept. 11. The McCain campaign has said it will air no ads that day.